Why Epstein’s Furious Grip on Washington Holds

Opinion|Why Epstein’s Furious Grip on Washington Holds

When the F.B.I. released a memo last month stating that it could find no evidence that the late financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein possessed a “client list” of prominent individuals for whom he procured underage girls, nor that he had blackmailed said men, the response from sections of the right was livid. “I just think that it’s a punch in the gut when regular people go to jail all the time, when they mess up and do something wrong, and then it always seems the rich, powerful elites escape,” Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, one of the loudest conservative critics to decry the Trump administration’s refusal to release more documents related to the case, told The Times. (A U.S. District Court judge on Wednesday denied the Department of Justice’s request to release more Epstein grand jury materials.)

One can understand, if not sympathize, with Ms. Greene’s predicament. As a woman who came to elected politics by way of the QAnon conspiracy theory and once denied that a plane struck the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, she was bound to be disappointed by anything other than a story combining elements of the Jimmy Savile pedophilia scandal, “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” and Oliver Stone’s feverish (and fallacious) reimagining of the Kennedy assassination, the 1991 film “JFK.”

Responding to the concerns expressed by Ms. Greene and other prominent voices on the right, the House Oversight Committee chairman James Comer issued a raft of subpoenas to President Trump’s former attorney general Bill Barr (who was deposed on Monday), Bill and Hillary Clinton, the last three Democratic attorneys general and other former public officials.

It isn’t just members of the MAGA faithful who are feeling let down by the lack of vindication for their theories regarding an international pedophile ring. “Do you stand with America’s children and survivors of abuse or with the wealthy and powerful who are being protected?” Representative Ro Khanna, a California Democrat and co-sponsor of a bipartisan bill to release the Epstein files, said last month. “The public deserves to know the truth and the survivors and their families deserve justice.”

Six years ago, the Democratic National Committee denounced “baseless conspiracy theories” surrounding Mr. Epstein’s death by suicide in a Manhattan jail cell. Today many Democrats accuse the Trump administration of “hiding the Epstein list” and insinuate that the files will reveal that Mr. Trump himself engaged in illegal activity.

That elements of the MAGA right and the #Resistance left have converged on the Epstein case in a coalition of the credulous makes sense. For the conspiratorially inclined, Mr. Epstein’s abuse of hundreds of girls and women is insufficiently horrific. Such a monstrous crime is explainable only if a shadowy cabal of international power brokers were involved.